


Sewn to Your Skin

by melforbes



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-25 22:26:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18270446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melforbes/pseuds/melforbes
Summary: When a renowned English dressmaker chooses to make her his muse, she finds her way into the crevices of his life, the in-betweens he would prefer not to show. AU adaptation of the film Phantom Thread





	1. Measurements

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to post this when it was complete, but it's been three months, and I hate delayed gratification and finishing things. Though some creative liberties have been taken, much of the plot is derived from the film Phantom Thread, which is absolutely brilliant. Still, people will be eaten eventually. I promise.

“May I take your measurements?”

She’s had such a thing done before, her blazers having had their sleeves shortened and shoulders sized, her brassieres changing with her body’s yearly fluctuations, but his hands are more delicate than her seamstress’s; he touches her as if restoring art, removing tarnish from the surface, pulling open a tale of oil paints from what once looked so drab and grey. As he stretches the tape-measure down her tensed arm, calls out a number by which she feels obliged to judge herself to his assistant, she feels exposed, an exhibition, a delight unsettled by what fantasies she can bring about. He looks at her with a sommelier's thoughtful, intense gaze, as if he doesn’t understand her but longs to, as if he’s educated in the art of her but has yet to encounter this particular challenge in his field. Then, he says a number, and she feels her skin change from glowing to pale.

He pins muslin to her, lamenting about the fit. Her breasts are bigger than he would like. For once, she’s unsure whether to be complimented or insulted, unsure that this man was a proper one from whom to accept a dinner invitation, but in the mirror she can see what his speech will never properly express: she is beautiful, she is exquisite, she is the proper woman to wear his dresses. In retaliation, she wants to shed the muslin, pulling each pin out and letting them fall to the floor with an antagonizing sound, taking the thin straps of her slip between thumb and forefinger and exposing herself to him. _Are you sure my breasts are too big?_  she wants to ask, fanning her fingers over them, accentuating one stretch mark, two, the wispy hairs around each areola. Such an action, she thinks, would break him into a sweat, thus proving exactly what she already knows: she is his perfection, and with perfection, with natural, exquisite beauty, comes power.

When he asks her which color swatch she prefers, she says, _I prefer the red._  He tries to sway her toward navy, the silk like river-water between his fingers. _I prefer the red._  Reaching out, he asks her to feel, _feel this fabric. The finest quality, dyed by hand. A pure, divine color._  She swallows, throat bobbing in a way he watches intently; her skin is the color of a freshly-cut apple, and with his look, she knows he longs to see how that color could change, what little affectionate marks he could leave upon her skin. Not now, of course not now, but eventually. Though his eyes are striking and intense, his fingers deft and stable like a surgeon’s, the way he views her enrapturing, she stands solidly alone and has no desire to stand another way.

 _The red,_  she says with finality, and for a moment, she feels the air change, as if she may be slapped, as if he may start yelling, but he doesn’t do either. She knows he’s incapable of either toward her. Pinning the red swatch to the muslin, he leaves his fingerprints on her skin, a promise. She’ll stay the night, not in his bedroom, perhaps not even in this house, but he’ll wake her the next day, and together, while she wears a wool coat he sewed with another woman in mind, they’ll take a walk by the cliffs, by the sea.

 _Will he kiss me?_  she asks herself with academic detachment as he takes the muslin off of her, the cold air of the studio turning her skin to gooseflesh, but she knows already, even before asking the question, that the answer is no. No, he’ll wait, he may not want to but will wait nonetheless, and she’ll be in his gowns long before he puts a romantic hand upon her, having mapped her body for scientific purposes only. She wants to tell him, _I have seen whole bodies, corpses of the deceased. I treated the living in the war, and I have felt the cold, uncomfortable skin of the long-dead beneath my bare fingertips. At the university, we were required to wear gloves, but I would sneak in midway through the night and touch them with my bare hands. Some of the corpses were so desecrated by bone-saws that they were hardly recognizable as human. I would take a needle and thread and restitch their bodies, pulling skin back together, not out of kindness but for a thrill. Do you know how it feels to piece together a human body? I had never believed in a god until I found one within myself, holding the heart of a dead man in the palm of my hand, squeezing the organ and watching the flex of the valves. Tell me, is the satisfaction of pulling together fabric with tiny stitches the same as that of sewing skin?_

She knows scientific detachment and chooses not to have it. Someday, she thinks she may be able to convince him to do the same.

* * *

When he next takes her to dinner, she wears the red dress, the silk shimmering beneath streetlamps as he holds doors open for her. She’s unaccustomed to this much fabric, to layered skirts, but she knows how to lengthen her neck, take shallow breaths, apply lipstick thickly enough to make a statement but thinly enough to have that statement seem merely implied. In some ways, this gown is a test of her vitality, her exuberance, her worth. Though she holds multiple degrees, and esteemed ones at that, she has never had a test feel so visceral. She wants him to take her hand in his and kiss her knuckles, and then, she wants to take his hand in hers and break each of the phalanges in his fingers. Admittedly, she would settle for dislocation, but she can already hear the crack, like ribs undone but louder. She wants to put her palms against his bare chest and feel his ribs beneath his skin.

He told her, _I keep a lock of my sister’s hair sewn in the canvas of my coat. That way, she is always with me._  When she asked him if he had sewn anything into the seams of her dress, he ignored the question.

This time, a new assistant, one younger but angrier, sits in a table alongside them at dinner as if she were a spy or a hovering parent. He speaks to her peripherally but speaks nonetheless as Bedelia pulls at her white gloves, as Bedelia wears his gown, as Bedelia wears red in this smoky restaurant with long windows and gold accents and rich meats on the menu. When he finally looks to Bedelia, he furrows his brow as if something is wrong, then takes his white cloth napkin and dabs it into her glass of water. Gently, he brings the napkin to her lips, and she’s stunned as he takes off what little lipstick she applied, leaves behind a red stain on the white cloth.

“I would like to see who I am talking to,” he says, setting the napkin down, his tone horribly and painfully even.

Turning away from Bedelia, he starts speaking to the assistant again, something about a fabric order, something about wool, and she makes a fist with her pale hand, feels her long nails digging into the flesh of her palm. Universally, men are infuriating. She listened as each one in medical school berated her, chastised her, talked down to her, explained things to her as if she were an idiot, and she took their beatings in that way, consented to their harm because silent success was better than any feat, because she was supposed to see herself as immaculately privileged and nothing else. A woman at medical school, those weren’t common in the fifties. Still, she hasn’t practiced professionally, struggling to find a group that will accept her, struggling to be accepted by men who have no desire to see her as anything other than a womb. She was waitressing when she met him, her extravagant but bland dressmaker, the man who chose her as his muse; one morning, she took his breakfast order, and now, she has a place to stay, photoshoots to take part in, an income sizable for an unmarried woman. She has everything that someone like her could ever want.

But she isn’t just some _woman._  She hates that that word has been used as an insult against her. Reaching into her clutch, she pulls out her lipstick, the copper case delicate and ornate between her fingers. She pushes the product up, the lipstick twisting as he speaks to his assistant, as he pays attention to anyone but her. Though she’s wearing his dress, though she’s the muse, she is negligible to him, a set-piece, an icon of the Virgin Mary left on a windowsill and ignored. He just wants her to be pretty. _Fuck pretty,_  she thinks, pushing the lipstick to her lips, crushing the wax and smearing it too wide around her mouth. _Fuck iconography. Fuck whatever you believe a muse to be. It doesn’t matter if I am naked or in your clothes. I am a woman. I am educated. I am exquisite. If that isn’t enough, then you are a useless shell of a man. I have no need for husks of men. I have no need for men like you. I spit on the graves of men like you._

When he turns to look at her, she’s slouching against their booth, mouth and cheeks smeared with lipstick, torso twisted toward him. In many works of art, the woman Eve twists her body, offering Adam the apple and showing treachery in her pose. She is a threat. It suddenly feels so pertinent that he know that.

But he doesn’t scold her. Instead, he shows her to her respective hotel room for the night, not one shared with him. The most he says is, _I will wake you for a morning fitting._  Though she asks when such a fitting would be, he stays silent, retreats to his own room, doesn’t say goodnight, and surely enough, he wakes her at three-thirty in the morning, knocking tempestuously at her door, shaking her from deep sleep; he stands her on a platform and pins muslin to her, pulls gowns over her near-bare body, inspects her silently while his all-too-alert assistant looks on with disdain. Is it jealousy, anger? Bedelia can’t tell, but she wants to attribute the look to ugliness so that she can excuse revenge. _He doesn’t want you,_  she wants to scream at this woman, and when he brings lace swatches against Bedelia's chest, thinks of wedding gowns to model on her, Bedelia wants to add on, _and he wants me very, very much._

In essence, their next date is a trip to London for her to model the wedding gown, her body presented on the front cover of his next editorial. It is close enough to sex, she thinks, that his knocks grow quieter with every new morning, and someday, she thinks he’ll tap ever-so-lightly and let himself in - she always leaves the door unlocked - and curl up alongside her like a little boy, and she’ll hold him to her chest and soothe him, and she’ll think of the royal family whose daughters he has to dress, and he’ll think of how ugly and stupid those girls can be, and she’ll draw him toward her perfect body, and she’ll tell him, _I am worthy of your dresses,_  she’ll kiss his forehead, _because I care for what they are worth. I care for your every stitch. But that care gives me power. I have power because I am worthy of your work, and if I leave, you lose all that I represent. You lose so much. But you won’t lose me._  She’ll pull him in, semi-salaciously. _That is, unless you try to silence me. Then, I will abandon you just as you deserve to be abandoned._

On Sunday, he takes her to St. Paul’s Cathedral for mass and prays in a way she knows he isn’t prone to. She’s wearing something from his collection, too white for her tastes but beautiful, buttery silk that she’ll indulge nonetheless. Behind them in the pews, two women look at her and ask if it’s one of _his._

 _I want to be buried in one of his dresses,_  one woman says.

 _Only when you’re dead will you be able to afford one,_  the other says, giggling under her breath. A little impish girl’s sound. Undeserving. These women have never spent more than a moment thinking about anything smaller than themselves.

 _Yes, but I’ll look so beautiful,_  the first woman says wistfully.

But Bedelia was there when the assistant told him that the late wife of a prominent politician had wished to be buried in one of his dresses, and he told his assistant no, these should never be interred. _If he wants to honor her memory,_  he said, as if such a thing were average and expected, _then he could let me resell the dress._

In the cathedral, he bows his head in prayer as if he believes in a god superior to him.


	2. Caught a Rabbit

Two hours into her morning fitting, she asks him, “Why your sister’s hair?”

These questions, they’re specifically off-limits; she knows that even if he hasn’t bothered to inform her. Still, she presses. She wants to know. No one sews a lock of hair into the breast of a jacket without a purpose. 

He folds and unfolds the muslin, furrowing his brow, trying to figure out what could have gone wrong. Nothing, she suspects, but he’ll doubt himself the whole way, every single number needing to be held accountable within his equations. Nowadays, she already starts taking deeper breaths when she can sense that he’s missed something, that the hour has gotten to him. She wonders if he’ll ever just sleep in instead so that these fittings could be much shorter and much, _much_  less stressful for both of them.

“She was my greatest teacher,” he gives, and she tenses with the admission. He usually fights her on these things. “When she began learning to sew, she taught me everything she knew. I find it important to keep her close.”

“Has she been gone a long time?” At least, she assumes the sister is dead. If not, why keep a lock of hair in the breast of a coat?

“Very,” he says, tone going gruff, and she can sense it; that’s the end of this discussion.

“I don’t have any siblings,” she says, and then, he pins the muslin down right, figuring out his own error. Through his fingertips against her skin, she can feel him calm. “My parents were particularly absent, and not particularly fond of each other.”

“I didn’t ask you a question,” he says, so she’s silent for the remainder of the fitting. Sometimes, she knows, she ought not to push. 

In a few weeks, his newest collection will be released, so he needs to finalize for the seamstresses all of the most important gowns, the ones on greatest display. She’ll have to change dresses twice for the show, behind the scenes in one of his back rooms. While she’s upstairs and sleeping, she can hear workers downstairs repainting the walls and tidying up the upholstery, keeping everything shipshape for the big day. Though he’s moved her into his London home, a big house with many floors that are more often used for work than for leisure, he still hasn’t changed anything else in her life: she is his muse, she wears his dresses, and she goes to sleep in her bed, not his. If he ever manages to stop scowling long enough, she thinks one day she will kiss him.

When she wakes the next morning - isn’t woken, so for some reason, there’s no fitting today, no last-minute item on his list - she finds the house quiet, mysteriously quiet. In the street below, she can hear cars going by, bicycle messengers, the sounds of chatting people, but these are city sounds, not home sounds; by now, shouldn’t someone be awake and working? If she weren’t so perplexed, she would stay in bed another hour, maybe two, and then amble into the kitchen for some breakfast, not minding what hour it is, but she pushes the lush comforter away, stands up to draw the heavy curtains open. Her bedroom has high ceilings, high windows, wide white walls adorned with beautiful moulding; she even has her own fireplace for the cold winters. In the closet, she has day-dresses, night-dresses, things a woman can wear in or out of the house, and all of them have his signature label sewn inside, _Lecter London_. The labels once bothered her, scratching at her skin, and she swore to him once that she would rip them all out, tear them away so that she could be comfortable again, but now, they feel practically sewn to her skin; if she removes the label, then she removes part of herself as well. 

She dresses quickly, a burgundy day-dress coming over her slip. As she pulls her hair from its silk wrap, she wonders, did he have an order to attend to? Are the seamstresses here? The workers are usually on the first or second floors, and she sleeps on the fourth, so they might be here even if she can’t hear them. Still, the house feels a tense kind of silent, as if absolutely no one else is inside right now. Did she miss something? But had she missed something, wouldn’t he have come into her room and woken her, angry with her about how she couldn’t manage her time? 

She finds the seamstresses working, but she can’t find anyone else, no Hannibal and no new assistant, so she ambles through the second floor, makes herself tea and poaches an egg for her croissant. As she butters her breakfast, letting out yolk as she brings her knife through the egg, she thinks, _This is much too silent,_  so she goes to the radio on the windowsill, brushes the dust off its dial, tunes to whatever she can find. Once she finds something so unlike his cherished opera and classical - she’s gone to so many operas now, she swears she can speak Italian - she returns to her solitary seat at the table, crunches through crusty bread, nods her head in time _oh, life could be a dream if I could take you up in paradise up above, if you would tell me I’m the only one that you love, life could be a dream._  He always tells her that she’s too loud in the mornings, that he can barely hear himself think as she spreads jam on her toast, but now, she can fill up the spaces in this too-big house, can inhabit whole floors of the place while everyone else is gone. She wonders where he is but also doesn’t care at all and hopes he stays there as long as he possibly can. 

After she finishes her breakfast, the song changes to something more upbeat, something Elvis. She doesn’t know much about him beyond how controversial his hips are, but personally, she’s always hated men’s hips. Too small, she thinks. She would see male cadavers and think that they couldn’t possibly be strong, not with hips like that. No, it was more interesting to see female cadavers, particularly the bodies of mothers. After studying a few female bodies, she was able to identify which women had and hadn’t given birth based on outward appearance exclusively; she would look to the breasts, to the bellies, and then, it would all be so clear. During the laboratory periods, the professors would ask them to later identify if these women had ever had children, and of course, Bedelia was correct each time, making her guesses long before they made their first incisions. Still, the classmates all dismissed her, claiming that it was just a womanly trait to recognize other women who had given birth. That was something they routinely did; they assumed that, somewhere deep down, she was, in fact, a mother. In some ways, the assumption made sense given her age, but she had been a nurse during the war, then a medical school student who was never granted her degree as a result of her sex; if men thought she had space in her life to marry and give birth within such parameters, she scoffed at their idiocy. But still, she couldn’t imagine a creature with such small hips being able to think of anything beyond his immediate needs. She isn’t sure men's bodies can handle such deep thinking.

The song is fun, a nice beat, so she sways her hips with the time of it, the _you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog_  bouncing off of the ornate, pristine walls of this home. Going over to the radio, she turns the song up, really dances to it, moves her legs and arms, plays with her skirt like flapper girls used to. Caught up in the music, she closes her eyes, bouncing along to the song, remembering days before the war when she would sneak out with friends to go swing-dancing. Of course, her parents said that such behavior was horrible for girls like her, but she loved dancing, loved thinking about nothing beyond the next few steps, loved being in the arms of beautiful boys who would ask polite permission to hold her hand. With the room filled with only her and the radio, she almost feels like a girl again, sneaking out of the house, dancing late into the night, wearing holes through her stockings and hoping her parents wouldn’t notice; those days, the ones before the war, when she would see Germany listed in newspaper headlines and think nothing of it, those were the good days, but now, when she thinks of them, she thinks of later training as a nurse at such a young age, creating tourniquets for amputated legs, bringing cool cloths over the foreheads of the dying. The only way she could find peace during those days was to speak to the soldiers, to ask them why exactly they were fighting; though her womanhood hadn’t afforded her much information from others, she really did want to understand. _The Japanese launched an attack on Pearl Harbor,_  one soldier would say, and she would piece together the information: Pearl Harbor was in America, America was a member of the Allies, Great Britain was also a member of the Allies, this was an attack on her homeland too. By the time the victory was announced, she found she couldn’t even celebrate, for she doubted that the world would look any different for her. Though the war had ended, so many people had perished. In her coming years in medical school, she would learn that experiments had been conducted on the least fortunate, and that she needed to respect those inhumane experiments because they advanced medical understanding. And still, the war didn’t so much end as it did stall, for the Americans and Soviets would keep threatening each other in silent ways. She went home to find London in pieces, her family tense and depressed, the world around her infinitely changed. It could never really be a victory because the destruction outweighed a win by far. She wondered if any war could ever truly be won.

But medical school made the memories of the war easier to stomach, for she could replace the sounds of screaming soldiers with the sounds of bone saws, could do the polar opposite of _serving men_  through being their sworn enemy. Though the school hadn’t wanted to admit her given her sex, she managed recommendations from those within higher education, those whose sons and grandsons she had kept alive during the war, so the university granted her an exception: she could attend all classes, follow all of their curriculum, but they would never, absolutely never, grant her a degree. At first, the arrangement felt perfect, like the greatest privilege she would ever be granted, but then, the men - all of the others were men, and much taller than she was, so she would have to stand on a textbook or two if she ended up in the back of the room during a cadaver laboratory, or they would have to let her push through and be annoyed for the whole period that a woman was standing in front of them - started being offered places to work, chances to be a part of hospital staff, while she couldn’t so much as hold a waitressing job. Still, she didn’t see those years as a waste, for they had drowned out the dull throb that was her history, the last of her teenage years being spent telling dying men that they weren’t going to die, at least not tonight, as she stroked their arms gently, tried to be the mother they were so desperately asking for. In the war, her patients were the dying, but in medical school, her patients were the dead; the contrast made life easier to bear.

But now, dancing to Elvis after breakfast, she doesn’t feel like a medical doctor without a degree, a fearful war-nurse, even a postergirl for London’s most elusive house of fashion; instead, she feels like a girl who is dancing with her friends after her curfew, a girl who will wear a hole through her stockings, a girl whose smile won’t leave her lips for days to come.

And she thinks that the smile now on her lips will last-

“What are you doing?”

His voice is stern but soft in a way that makes her slow down, open her eyes with caution; he’s staring at her from the doorway, brows furrowed, arms flat at his sides, and if she didn’t know him as well as she does, she wouldn’t think that he’s angry, but knowing him well, she knows he’s seething. If he were another man, she would reach out to him and ask him to dance, but the song is over, and he’s going to resent her for this, for filling his house with noise, for moving at all. Sometimes, she thinks he wants her to be a photograph and nothing more, a doll kept in his attic, but then, he’ll touch her, and his hands imply something more, something _someday,_  something beautiful. She wants that _someday_  almost desperately, even if she’ll never tell him that. Though men are weak creatures, they have the power to make her feel as if, at all hours of the day, she is dancing. She wants him to touch her and make her feel as if she’s dancing.

“Turn that off,” he demands, looking to the radio, and though she wants to listen, though she moves to turn it off, she doesn’t want the music to end. No, she wants it to keep playing, even if she can’t dance to the tune. She wants to sit down with him and talk while there is sound in the background. This man, her man, he loves silence so much, works in silence, allows only the sound of his fountain pen across paper; she wants to crush his silence, break the glass windows with sound. She wants to let air into this house. She wants to let life in.

But she turns off the radio. _Not today,_  she thinks, then wonders when else she could.

“Your taste is abhorrent,” he says, and then, trailed by the assistant, he leaves to go upstairs, maybe to change clothes, maybe to have a lie-down, maybe to clench his fists until he isn’t angry anymore. For a moment, the assistant lingers behind, staring at Bedelia with a strange, ashamed wistfulness, as if she wants the same sensation but hates herself for wanting anything at all. 

With the room empty once more, Bedelia takes to the radio again, turns the volume far enough down that she can only hear music if she crouches next to the radio, presses her ear right next to the box. They’re playing Glenn Miller; she closes her eyes and imagines which steps she would do if he allowed her to move and thinks, _I like my taste._


End file.
